Riven Doggeries

by James Tate

The latest collection of poems by the popular Yale Younger Poet further displays his talent for the brilliantly sardonic and the grimly humorous

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

James Vincent Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He taught creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University, and at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he worked since 1971. He was a member of the poetry faculty at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers, along with Dara Wier and Peter Gizzi.

Dudley Fitts selected Tate's first book of poems, The Lost Pilot (1967) for the Yale Series of Younger Poets while Tate was still a student at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop; Fitts praised Tate's writing for its "natural grace." Despite the early praise he received Tate alienated some of his fans in the seventies with a series of poetry collections that grew more and more strange.

He published two books of prose, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (2001) and The Route as Briefed (1999). His awards include a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize in poetry, a National Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was also a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Tate's writing style is difficult to describe, but has been identified with the postmodernist and neo-surrealist movements. He has been known to play with phrases culled from news items, history, anecdotes, or common speech; later cutting, pasting, and assembling such divergent material into tightly woven compositions that reveal bizarre and surreal insights into the absurdity of human nature.

Reviews

[Luke T · Rating 3 out of 5]

While most of these poems are forgettable, this collection saved itself from being a two star book by the fact that on two occasions I laughed out loud, and that there were about half a dozen good poems.

"Riven Doggeries", "You Already Said That", "Vallejo", "Across the Heavens", "Goodtime Jesus" and "The Responsible Romance", and perhaps a couple more were good. Otherwise the rest should have been left on the cutting room floor.

Here's "Across the Heavens"

I saw a man knocked 30 feet through the air by a speeding car today. I was standing next to him at the corner when he stepped out as the light changed. He was an ordinary looking bloke, out for a beer and sandwich on his lunch hour from the furniture warehouse. A couple of dozen shopkeepers and shoppers viewed the whole thing from the screech and thump to the arrival of the ambulance and the efforts to revive him. There wasn't so much as a drop, clean. A childlike gaze, flickering smile; then back into the launderette I went, walking on huge, springy clouds.

[Jason Fickett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hate poetry, but I like James Tate. Though I could imagine some dipshit saying exactly the opposite and making the classic complaint against abstract art: "I could do that. Anyone can just throw a bunch of random words together and call it a poem."
I appreciate the aim (or lack of aim) being so entirely different from any other poetry I've read. If you read and re-read them (I took it slow: 2-3 each day), your mind gets to enter a different zone, warp to new vibes, stop making the same old, boring sense. I appreciate that.

[edmondegreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book. A midway point between the conjoinment of Tate's two distinctive styles.

[Mel · Rating 2 out of 5]

James Tate, you odd duck. Much of this felt like a fever dream.
Will likely not reread, but there are a few bits and pieces I liked.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Quiet as a Chinese proverb the body
executes itself, an old castle goes up
in smoke and a continent slips away.
The night sky lights up with huge buoyant relief."

Tate crosses the gulf between macrocosm and microcosm. The word are wind. Something peculiar happens when you read one of his poems. It either floats like a cork inside a bottle of wine or it explodes. If it is trapped in the bottle, it is a little harder to drink the wine. If it explodes, it is hard to clean up. The bones of language are exposes. Narrative dreams of everything it could be if most people didn't just dream like sheep.

Like taking a hit of acid, you don't have to understand how it works for it to work. The same thing happens when you read one of James Tate's poems. You shouldn't be asking yourself what it means, but how you have changed now that you have read it.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection is hard to find but I snagged a sweet hardcover edition at Powell's. JT was 36 when the book came out. He has a soul patch underneath his pretty mouth in the author photo. He is wearing a dark suit and has dark hair. The poems are good but not his best. They seem to be struggling to reach that serene oddness that he later mastered. The last section, entitled Missionwork, has some great lines though, like: Today she's bald, tomorrow she's only receding. And: His fairly difficult piano passage died in a Pancake House around 3 a.m.